Monday, 15 June 2015

Asper & Co.

Asper was my first attempt at large-scale genetic engineering and she came out surprisingly well considering. The aim of this experiment was to create a norn that eats more often on its own, and while this goal wasn't achieved it did produce some interesting effects. I hatched Asper in my world with my non-modified Norns and she has two living descendants - Michelle and Aladdin - and four unhatched ones. She's dead now, but as my first real experiment she holds a special place in my heart.

Now let's get into her genetics. I'll give you a warning first though: when I made Asper I knew almost nothing about genetics and some of the changes don't really make sense. Let's start with a couple of simple ones:

The first gene is the stimulus for being patted by the hand and the second is an instinct gene that encourages the Norn to sleep when it is tired (note that it's tired, not sleepy, they're different drives). The only thing I've changed in these genes is that I've increased the amount of reward Asper gets.

This is the stimulus gene for when the Norn hears an unrecognised word. Usually all it does is make the sound of an unrecognised word stimulating, but here I've bumped up how stimulating it is and put in three chemicals that it will also add to Asper when she hears an unrecognised word: conASh, decASH1, and decASH2. I think I put these in because I saw them being described as related to learning somewhere, even though I didn't know then (and still don't properly understand now) what these chemicals actually do.

This gene is the stimulus for when the Norn is quiescent - in other words, doing nothing. The change here is that I've put tiredness decrease on it, which I think I put in to help stop Asper becoming tired when she wasn't sleepy enough to actually get some rest.

This gene is one of the most noticeable changes, although it might seem tiny. This gene is the stimulus gene for when the hand speaks and what it does is give the event some significance and injects the creature with a couple of chemicals. The change I have made is increasing the significance to the maximum. The idea behind this was to get Asper to listen to what I was saying, but what it actually did was make it so that she couldn't resist staring at the hand whenever I spoke. It was still mildly helpful in getting her to eat, though: whenever I spoke she'd look at and then follow the hand, which allowed me to lead her away from other Norns which removed the distractions and made it easier to feed her.

Finally, these are two completely new instinct genes. What they do is encourage Asper not to go left if I ask her to go right (first gene) and not to go right if I ask her to go left (second gene). Really I don't think these were very useful and I'm not sure why I put them in in the first place.

Michelle and Aladdin, and Asper's unhatched descendants, have each inherited the majority of these changes and between them there is at least one copy of each gene. While I'm going to shelve this idea of making Norns who eat more for now - I'd rather work on a couple of the other genetics projects that I started but never finished - it's certainly taught me a lot about genetics, and I am glad of the genes she's left behind in her descendants, even if not all of those were well thought out or beneficial.